Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The story had a familiar beginning, but took an unexpected
detour en route to an unanticipated conclusion.

Dante
Price, a young black man, was trying to visit his girlfriend and infant son
at the Summit Square apartment complex in Dayton, Ohio. Price was confronted by
two uniformed, armed officers who told him had been banned from the property as
a trespasser.

The incident in which Dante Price was killed bears an
uncanny resemblance to the shooting death of Danielle
Willard by police in West Valley City, Utah in November 2012. In both
cases, the victim was confronted by armed officers, refused orders to exit the
vehicle, and was shot while trying to flee. Shaun Cowley, the former West
Valley City Police Detective who killed Willard, claimed that he acted in
self-defense.

Salt Lake County DA Sim Gill, in an almost unprecedented act
of principle, indicted
Cowley for manslaughter. That prompted nearly the entire “criminal justice”
system in Utah to rally behind Cowley.

Former federal Judge Paul Cassell, who volunteered his services
as defense counsel for Cowley, complained
that “a guilty verdict in this case will jeopardize the safety of the community
by making police officers fearful of defending themselves against criminals who
are threatening deadly force.” Casell insisted that the simple act of charging
Cowley endangered that most precious of all imaginable things, “officer safety.”

Utah Third District Judge L.A. Dever agreed, dismissing
the charge in an October pre-trial hearing. Despite the overwhelming
evidence that neither Cowley nor his partner was in the path of the vehicle at
the time the fatal shots were fired, Judge Dever accepted the defendant’s claim
that he “reasonably believed” the non-compliant driver posed a potential
threat.

Officers Tarbert and Wissinger offered the same defense
regarding their decision to shoot Price, but it availed them nothing. Rather
than being exonerated immediately, the officers
faced a long and expensive legal ordeal.
While they were awaiting resolution of their case, another lethal force
incident involving an unarmed black man took place at a retail store that had
probably been frequented by the late Dante Price.

Last September, John Crawford, III was fatally shot by
police at a Wal-Mart in Beavercreek – about seventeen miles from the apartment
complex where Price was killed. At the time, Crawford was holding in one hand a
BB rifle he intended to purchase, and carried a cell phone in the other. Sgt. David Darkow and Officer Sean Williams, who responded to a thoroughly inaccurate report via a panic-stricken 911
call shot Crawford within seconds of their arrival at the store.

In this case, rather than investigating the actions of the
officers, the Dayton-area Beavercreek PD strove to find some way to blame the victim for the
shooting. Tasha Thomas, the Crawford’s traumatized girlfriend, was detained andinterrogated for over an hour and a half by Beavercreek Detective Rodney Curd, who did
everything he could to manipulate her into saying that Crawford was carrying an
actual firearm. To that end Curd followed standard police procedure by lying to
Thomas and threatening her with criminal charges unless she supplied him with
the story he wanted.

“I want to be very clear, OK?” Curd told the sobbing woman. “That
man got a weapon at some point, I understand, OK? That man produced that
weapon. That man had the weapon when you picked him up. He had it in your car
or something. You understand that we’re investigating a serious incident. You
lie to me, and you might be on your way to jail, so I want to be very clear
about that.”

Curd also pretended that Thomas, who was weeping and in
shock, appeared to be on drugs.

The detective succeeded in extorting consent for a search of
Thomas’s car and cellphone. During the entire ordeal the terrified woman hadn’t
been informed that Crawford was dead. Curd withheld that news until after he
had concluded the interrogation – and then disclosed it to her in what amounted
to a final act of gratuitous, dishonest sadism: “Unfortunately John has passed
away as a result of this. What happened there isn’t a good thing and as a result of his actions he is gone.”
(Emphasis added.)

Scant hours had passed since Crawford – who had done nothing
wrong or illegal – had been killed without cause or justification by Dayton-area
police, but the official story was already set in granite: Crawford was dead “as
a result of his actions,” not those of the privileged killers who had
perforated his body with high-velocity rounds.

From the beginning, the Beavercreek PD and its allies in the Dayton-area "justice" system treated John Crawford as a
“suspect,” rather than as a victim, solely because he had been killed by fellow
police officers. Significantly, that had not been the case in the March 2012
shooting of Dante Price at an apartment complex just a few minutes’ drive away
from the Wal-Mart where Crawford was killed. In that earlier case, Price had
been identified as the victim, and the officers who shot him were treated as
criminal suspects.

Yes, Tarbert and Wissinger wore special costumes that
included glittering baubles denoting their status as “officers”; they carried
guns, and conducted patrols.

Their physical conditioning, mental acumen, and
competence with firearms were certainly up to par with the undemanding
standards of most municipal police departments. As their encounter with Price
demonstrated they had learned to bark orders at the public, treat
non-compliance as a threat to “officer safety,” and recite the expected
self-exculpatory phrases after killing someone who had defied them.

“The shooters were employed as private security guards
through Ranger Security – they were not
police officers,” explained
Montgomery County DA Mat Heck. “They did not have any special arrest
powers, authority or privileges beyond what a private citizen would have….
[T]hese private security guards had no legal authority to detain or attempt to
detain the victim, and had no legal authority to use or threaten to use deadly
force in order to make the victim comply with their orders.”

Justin Wissinger

Tarbert and Wissinger were lawfully employed as contract
security personnel to guard private property, and turn away uninvited
intruders. But they hadn’t been consecrated as members of the State’s punitive
priesthood, and without that official unction they weren’t able to
transubstantiate aggressive violence into “law enforcement.”

Despite the trappings of their profession, their formal
training, and their state-issued licenses, Tarbert
and Wissinger were Mundanes, and thus were not endowed with “qualified
immunity” that would protect them from accountability for their act of
criminal homicide. The blame for the incident was imputed to them, rather than
to the unarmed, fleeing victim. They didn’t have standing to insist that Price
had died “as a result of his actions,” as the Beavercreek PD claimed in the killing
of unarmed John Crawford.

Owing to the fact that police are employed by the class that preys on property, they have no obligation to protect it against crime. Those who want that service have to pay for it out of their own resources, in addition to surrendering the taxes that are used to pay the police. There are at least three times as many private security and investigative specialists than government law enforcement agents in this country. Nearly all of them -- apart from moonlighting police officers -- confront genuine risks on behalf of their customers, and do so without the benefit of "qualified immunity."

Tarbert at his sentencing hearing.

This means that when they screw up, private peace officers, unlike government-employed police, can be held accountable.

Tarbert and Wissinger were entirely within their rights to
demand that Price leave privately owned property where he wasn’t welcome. In
doing so they comported themselves as peace officers acting in defense of
property rights. Unfortunately they decided to mimic the behavior of law
enforcement personnel by attempting to detain Price, trying to humiliate him by
ordering him to the ground, and then summarily executing him for disobeying
their orders.

As District Attorney Heck observed, because the guards were
not state-employed purveyors of violence, they had no “authority” to restrain,
demean, threaten, or kill someone who hadn’t committed an act of criminal
aggression but simply refused to “comply with their orders.” What neither he
nor anyone else can rationally explain is why anybody can claim such authority.Note: In the original version of this essay I erroneously reported that John Crawford's killers are employed by the Dayton Police Department, rather than the Beavercreek PD. I regret that error, and express thanks to the readers who corrected it.

Both
sides agree that nobody needs to worry about getting hurt as long as they
render immediate and unqualified submission to the police.They also agree that individuals have the right
to resist when they are being abused and their lives threatened by the police.
They can embrace these mutually exclusive propositions because of a third point
on which they tacitly agree: The duty to submit, and the right to resist,
depend entirely on the identity of the person or people on the receiving end of
state-licensed abuse.

This is to say that both
sides agree with Vladimir Lenin's dictum that in politics the basic question is
“Who does what to Whom.” They have also embraced Lenin's formula for
“scientific dictatorship” – “Power without limit, resting directly on force,
restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules.”

Police
officers are situational Leninists, authorized to use lethal force to make
people submit to their will, irrespective of the law.

Even
if we stipulate that citizens have a duty to render immediate compliance with
police “commands,” Rice had no time to comply. Rather than conceding that
point, Follmer used the child's death as an object lesson to other Mundanes:
You are the property of the State, andwhat liberties you enjoy – including the freedom to continue breathing –
are subject to summary termination at the whim of a police officer.

Immediate,
unqualified obedience to a police officer “eliminates a lot of problems,”
Follmer insists. “I think the nation needs to realize that when we tell you to
do something, do it, and if you’re wrong you’re wrong, and if you’re right,
then the courts will figure it out.”

And
if you are brutalized or killed without cause by a member of the State's
Punitive Priesthood, the courts will not be troubled by the matter, because the
system's mechanisms of self-justification will quickly ratify the lethal
actions of the police officer.

There
is a heuristic process in place – but it is designed to reform and correct the
behavior of the public, rather than that of the police departments supposedly
established for its protection. The burden is on us to submit to the armed
people who are supposedly our servants. As a punitive populist meme dictates: “Breathe
easy – don't break the law.”

“We
are not here to do anything negative to the public,” insists Barthel. “We’re
here to protect the public and we want you to breathe easy knowing that the
police are here to be with you and for you and protect you.”

Police officers – as I have wearied myself in pointing out – have no
enforceable duty to protect any citizen from criminal violence. They are paid
to enforce the will of the political class that preys upon property, a role that
includes inflicting criminal violence on those whose seek to protect their
property against such predation.

Jason
Barthel divides his time between law enforcement and honest work as a small
business owner. As a police officer, Mr. Barthel can commit criminal violence —
including homicide — and take
refuge in the claim of “qualified immunity.” In private life, however, he could very easily
be prosecuted and ruined for any of the myriad regulatory infractions he
inevitably commits every day as an entrepreneur – and wind up being fatally
deprived of breath if, like Eric Garner, he refused to cooperate with the imperious
demands of a law enforcement officer.

Both
Cliven Bundy and Eric Garner were accused of tax evasion – Bundy of refusing to
pay grazing fees to the federal government, Garner of selling individual
untaxed cigarettes. Both of them were confronted by law enforcement personnel
who were prepared to confiscate their property and kill them if they resisted.

Garner
was murdered on the streets of Staten Island because he dared to assert self-ownership
– “It stops today!” is the modern equivalent of “Don't tread on me” – and
nobody on the scene was willing, or able, to come to his defense.

Bundy
is alive because of the intervention of armed fellow citizens who were willing
to point guns at police in defense of the rancher, his family, and their
rights. He was also predictably – and quite dishonestly – accused of being a
racist. All of the denunciations of Bundy were offered by left-leaning
commentators who have more recently discovered that the horrors of police
militarization and the culture of impunity that characterizes law enforcement.

Many
of the same right-leaning commentators who extolled Cliven Bundy's resistance
to the BLM and the Las Vegas Metro Police have dismissed Garner as a “thug” and
a “career criminal,” and insist that the murder of two NYPD officers is a
direct result of “anti-police hate speech.”

“Like
Pontius Pilate[,] who deluded himself into thinking that he could `wash his
hands' of his part in Jesus' death, so too do Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Eric
Holder, Bill DeBlasio, and every other politician, `civil rights activist,' and
commentator who did their part to fuel the inferno of anti-police rhetoric
think that they can no wash their hands of their responsibility for the murders
of [NYPD] Officers Ramos and Liu,” bloviates authoritarian commentator Jack
Kerwick at TownHall.com.

Writing from the right-Leninist perspective –
which in this case dictates collective guilt on the basis of imputed motives --
Kerwick
claims that “the only difference” between murderer Ismaiiyl Brinsley and
critics of the police is that “while those who regard police as `racists' or
`armed enforcers' of `the State' talk the talk, Brinsley actually walked the
walk.”

Interestingly,
Kerwick – who fancies himself a philosopher of sorts -- doesn't explain why, in
the case of the torture and execution of Jesus, he condemns the judge who
imposed the death sentence, and the officers who dutifully carried out their
lawful orders by executing it, choosing instead to take the side of the
condemned criminal.

But
I digress.

"Words
mean things,” insisted
another right-wing proponent of collective guilt in the murder of Officers
Liu and Ramos. “Words cause actions." The journal published by the
organization over which that individual presides peddled a similarly expansive
indictment, identifying the “real enemy” as “those who stoke the fires of
racial unrest with rhetoric forged on lies and feeding, every day, on
blood."

Transpose
those sentiments into a slightly different collectivist idiom, and they are
indistinguishable from the rhetoric that came out of the Clinton White House,
and the State-aligned media, following the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.

That
terrorist act, we were told, precipitated from a "climate of
violence" created by "anti-government extremists" who condemned
the Waco Massacre while routinely -- and quite properly -- referring to the ATF
and other federal law enforcement shock troops as "Jackbooted Thugs."

At
the time of the bombing, the cover The New American magazine – the publication
alluded to above -- depicted an ATF badge with the headline: "Freedom's
Foes." For the next several years, TNA and its sponsoring organization
were routinely denounced as part of the "real enemy" who "stoked
the fires of [political] unrest" with anti-government rhetoric.

At the
time, I was a senior editor at that publication, which led to being listed – by
name – as a terrorist sympathizer in a law enforcement training program produced
by a federal subcontractor named John Nutter.

Subsequent
to the murders of Liu and Ramos, we have been instructed to pretend that this
crime happened because a small and atypical group of anti-police protesters
chanted: “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!”

In
similar fashion, following the massacre of 168 people – including 17 children –
in the OKC bombing, the Regime and its servitors in the media sought to
implicate the entire conservative sub-population in that crime. That agitprop
campaign focused heavily on anti-government “hate rhetoric,” such as the advice
provided by syndicated talk show host – and convicted felon – G. Gordon Liddy
to listeners in the event of an ATF raid.

"Head
shots, head shots,” Liddy
instructed. “Kill the sons of bitches... Shoot twice to the belly and if
the does not work, shoot to the groin area. Arm yourself. Get instructed in how
to shoot straight. And don't register [your weapons] either."

An
updated version of that refrain was taken up against the “insurrectionist
right” earlier this year after Jerad and Amanda Miller, who were banished from
Bunkerville by supporters of Cliven Bundy, murdered three people — Las Vegas Metro
Officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo, and Joseph Wilcox, an armed citizen who
heroically tried to stop their rampage.

Apart
from his well-documented hostility toward law enforcement, Ismaiiyl Brinsley
had no connection of any kind to the nation-wide movement in opposition to
police brutality.

The Millers, on the other hand, were among many hundreds of people who traveled
to Bunkerville, Nevada to support rancher Cliven Bundy in his confrontation
with the BLM. They may well have been the only volunteers who were asked to
leave because of concerns regarding what was described as their “aggressive
nature” and eagerness to incite violence. During their brief visit, however,
Jerad was interviewed by the local NBC affiliate, which meant that he was depicted
as representative of the people who had rallied to the Bundy family’s cause.

Significantly,
the only mention Mr. Berwick made of Cliven Bundy during or following the
Bunkerville stand-off was to condemn Republican politicians and commentators
who had abandoned the rancher after he was traduced as a “racist” for
expressing cultural views not dramatically different from those of more
conventional conservatives.

“Republicans
would be well served to heed Christ’s admonition to remove the boulder from
their own eyes before proceeding to pluck out the pebble from the eyes of their
neighbors,” Kerwick
pontificated, sparing Bundy and his supporters from criticism for actually
threatening to kill police officers in defense of their property rights.

Like
much of the activist Left, interestingly, Kerwick and other conservatives are
eager to re-purpose the controversy over the police state into an overtly racial
conflict – one side depicting police as enforcers of “white privilege,” the
other condemning critics of the police for promoting the idea of black
victimhood and the “entitlement mentality.” This is precisely the quarrel our
self-appointed rulers want us to have. In this way, the public will be obsessed
over the question of whether their officially designated collective is the
“who” or the “whom.”

In this fashion, the public will be distracted from critical examination of the
“what” – state-licensed aggressive violence – and be dissuaded from pondering
the possibility that if the “what” were removed from the equation, the “who”
and the “whom” wouldn't matter nearly as much.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Not the only one: Chokeholds are illegal, but widely used by police anyway.

David Mack was dying of strangulation in front of his
horrified teenage sons while nearly a dozen Buffalo Police Officers looked on
with indifference. The man who was killing Mack, Gregory Kwiatowski, was a
member of their privileged tribe. The other cops at the scene understood that
their duty was to protect the assailant, rather than to aid the victim.

“My father was laying there blue, I ain’t never seen him
like that,” Wesley
Mack later testified in court. “A lady cop went up to him and said, `Chill,
Greg, you’re choking him,’ and she pulled his arm and he jumped up and popped
her.”

“Get the hell off me, you black bitch!” snarled the
uniformed embodiment of all that is good and decent, slugging the female
officer in the face.

Mack had been arrested by Officer Anthony Porzio for “contempt
of cop” after exchanging words with Officer Paul Sobkowiak, who had responded
to a domestic disturbance report. A postal carrier told Sobkowiak that Mack had
been withholding Social Security checks from his ex-girlfriend, who still
received her mail at the address.

Sobkowiak called for backup and a throng of officers
converged on the home. Commanded to turn over the check, Mack went into his
house and retrieved what he claimed was all of the mail he had received that
day. After the cops accused him of concealing the check, Mack told them to
leave him alone. Defiance of that kind from a Mundane is impermissible, of course,
so Sobkowiak attacked Mack, as did Kwiatowski and every other officer on the scene.

“Where one acts, all must follow,” is the unwritten but
binding code of the Blue Tribe.

Officer Cariol Horne with attorneys.

Horne
was among the cops who responded to an “officer in distress” call. She didn’t
see the initial assault, but when she arrived at the address she helped drag
Mack out of the house. Like all police officers, she had been programmed to
follow the code of the Blue Tribe without hesitation. Kwiatowski’s conduct
caused Horne’s resilient human decency to rebel and overcome that programming.

Once Mack had been handcuffed, Kwiatowski decided to inflict
summary punishment for the impermissible act of resisting arrest, beating the
prone and helpless 59-year-old man. The assault quickly escalated to attempted
murder as Kwiatowski turned Mack around and sank a chokehold.

There were, once again, nearly a dozen police officers on
the scene. Horne – a tiny black woman who was roughly half Kwiatowski’s size --
was the only one who assumed the role of peace officer by intervening to
prevent the murder of an innocent man. The use of lethal force would have been
justified, but Horne – once again acting as a peace officer – used proportionate
force, even though in doing so she exposed herself to risk.

“I thought whatever happened in the house [Kwiatokski] was
still upset about so when he didn’t stop choking him I just grabbed his arm
from around Neal’s neck,” Horne recalled in a recent television interview. “He
comes up and punches me in the face and I had to have my bridge replaced.”

Mack, who survived the assault, was hit with the predictable
assortment of cover charges, which were just as
predictably dismissed. Cariol Horne was charged with “obstruction” for
supposedly “jumping on Officer Kwiatowski’s back and/or striking him.”

Kwiatowski himself admitted that although Horne intervened, “she
never got on top of me.” The charge filed against her was as spurious as those
lodged against Mack, and they served precisely the same purpose – namely,
providing pseudo-legal cover for an act of official retaliation.

Significantly, the Buffalo City Government waited until May
2008 to terminate Horne. At the time she was two months from retirement, which
means that she lost her pension. Among the “charges” upheld against Horne was
the accusation that she had impermissibly told her story to the media.

Hero: Officer Tasca stops a beating.

Mack and his son Wesley, who was also arrested during the
November 2006 police riot at their home, filed a civil suit against the police
who assaulted and abducted them. A six-member jury ruled against them – five white
jurors siding with the officers, the sole black panelist with the black
plaintiffs.

Kwiatowski filed a defamation suit against Horne, which he
won because the former officer -- a single mother with young children to
support – was too busy earning a living to appear in court. Horne found
employment in the productive sector as a truck driver, an honorable profession
that is considerably more dangerous that law enforcement.

When he wasn’t seeking revenge in the courts, Kwiatowski
earned a promotion to Lieutenant through the conduct Horne had attempted to
stop. He was eventually allowed to retire – with a full pension – at age 46
after several other episodes of criminal violence, including
one in which he assaulted an off-duty NFTA Officer. That attack, appropriately
occurred at a restaurant following a police union dinner. The victim admonished
some of his comrades for being loud, vulgar, and abusive, and warned that other
patrons were capturing the event on their cell phones. This violated the
unwritten rules of the Blue Tribe, and Kwiatowsky inflicted what he considered
to be the appropriate punishment.

Several months ago, Kwiatowski and three current members of
the Buffalo PD were indicted by a federal grand jury for civil rights
violations allegedly committed in 2009. Even apart from his subsidized
retirement, Kwiatowski remains a burden on Buffalo’s tax victims.

Renewed scrutiny of Kwiatowski’s behavior was prompted, in
part, by the suspension of Buffalo
PD Officer Robert Eloff last May. Eloff was put on paid vacation after the
department’s internal affairs division began investigating his role in a
near-fatal assault on an Air National Guardsman at Molly’s Pub, a bar where
Eloff was paid $25 an hour to moonlight as a security guard.

Officer Robert Eloff.

The victim, William Sager, suffered a traumatic brain injury
after being pushed down a flight of stairs by the pub’s manager. Surveillance
tape from the bar reportedly shows Eloff and the manager going into the room
where the recording equipment is kept just shortly before the video went dark. Rather than rendering aid to the victim, Eloff
– in keeping with his training – handcuffed him in the interest of “officer
safety.” A friend of the victim called 911 to report that they were being
abused and harassed by Eloff and fellow Buffalo PD Officer Adam O’Shei, who was
also working as a bouncer.

Eloff was also involved in the recent gang-beating of a man named
Christopher Kozak, who was set upon by a thugscrum of at least a half-dozen
Buffalo PD officers – and then left in a bloody heap on the sidewalk without being
arrested or charged with an offense.

Amid these accumulating incidents of criminal depravity,
Horne has renewed her campaign for vindication – not merely for self-interested
reasons, but also to protect the public from the entitled, costumed bullies who
prowl their streets.

Destitute, but honest: Horne in private life.

“If the message they want to give is that an officer is
going to be fired if they stop [abuse], then that’s the wrong message,” Horne
observes. Of course, that is
precisely the intended message: A police officer who attempts to strangle a
handcuffed and defenseless man can expect a promotion, but an officer who
carries out her legal duty to prevent that murder can expect to be assaulted,
criminally charged, and financially ruined.

The treatment endured by Cariol Horne provides some
necessary context to the police murder of Eric Garner. Some
authoritarian-minded commentators, seeking to defend that crime as a necessary
vindication of “law” in the face of defiance, have sought to deflect the blame
from Officer Daniel Pantaleo to his “black,
female supervisor” – the latter description lacquered with facile irony by
people desperate to define such issues in terms of racial collectivism.

The officer who was an accessory to the murder of Eric
Garner achieved that position because she had been faithful to what former
LAPD Officer Mike Rothmiller calls “the code of the Blue Tribe: When one
acted, all must follow.”

Government law enforcement, as an institution, is defined by
that ethic, which is why it cannot be reformed.